Social Media Marketing for Complete Beginners

When it comes to generating leads, creating a community, and interacting with your customers, nothing tops social media. Social media is the perfect way to build exposure for your brand and increase traffic to your website, but how do you do that?

Optimize Your Profile

If You’re Just Getting Started:

Complete your profile, about and/or bio on all social media platform(s) you choose to use. In many cases, how you define yourself in your profile can persuade a first-time visitor to become a follower.

Be sure to add a photo of you or a logo your business (no random pictures of balloons or animals, please).

Use a tagline that encapsulates who you are and what you offer. This can help audiences self-filter, and that’s a good thing. It’s better to focus on gaining followers who will actually do business with you.

Fill out your address and contact details. There’s nothing more infuriating than trying to email someone and not being able to find an email address or, at the very least, a link back to your website.

Automate your postings.Social media requires consistency, but you’re so busy that sometimes you forget to log-in and post. That’s why you need a scheduling tool that will do your posting for you on times that you set. Fortunately, there are a lot of fantastic options to choose from, such as:

Perfect your bio photo. You may already have a photo on your profile, but now it’s time to take it to the next level.

Research shows that the most attractive and compelling bio photos:

Show your face and upper body

Feature a smile, but not a laugh

Show your eyes (no sunglasses)

Have no noise in the background (solid backgrounds are preferred)

Show that you’re wearing professional attire

Have little or no text (text can be difficult to read in smaller sizes)

Is a real photo, not a stock photo

Choose your cover photo wisely. Most social media platforms give you the opportunity to visually communicate your brand message. It’s called the cover photo, and most brands fail to fully optimize this real estate.

Use your cover photo to encapsulate what your brand is about. But remember that your image should be a simple message that’s easy to understand. For example, if you run a charity that provides text books to elementary school students, choose a picture from a recent event that shows your volunteers handing out books to happy children.

Link your social media account to an optimized landing page. People who’ve been initially introduced to you through social media should be directed to a customized “start here” page on your website. Instead of linking back to the home page of your website, link to a page that highlights your best content or in some way leads the visitor into a relationship with your brand.

For example, you may offer a lead magnet here that encourages your first time site visitors to join your email list. Think of this landing page as a gentle introduction into learning more your brand.

Don’t Try to Be Everywhere

Ideally, you only need to post in the places where your audience is active. If you mostly deal with other businesses, you’re probably better served on LinkedIn than you are on Snapchat.

Start with one platform. Not sure which to choose? It’s vital to understand the most popular platforms and what strategy works on each one.

Get Started on Facebook

If You’re Just Getting Started:
If you’re not sure which platform to start on, I’d recommend Facebook. Why? Facebook has over 1 billion active users every month, and 70% of those users are active every day. It stands to reasons that at least some of your target audience is on Facebook.

On Facebook, the very first thing you should do is create a Facebook business page. You need a business page instead of a personal page for added functionality.

Once you are set up, follow these best practices:

Include a photo, video or GIF with your posts. Research shows that visuals increase engagement.

Build your community by asking questions, replying to comments, hosting contests and sharing coupons and promotions.

If You’re Making Improvements:Choose the right call to action. On Facebook, the best way to show people how to further engage with your brand is by using the call to action button. This button is located on the bottom of your cover photo. But instead of directing people to sign up or visit your website, you can also ask for donations. This call to action is especially useful for charities.

Brand your cover image. Earlier, we discussed how to create a cover image that quickly conveys your brand message. But there’s another way to make it useful on Facebook. You can literally point to your call to action button, drawing your visitors’ attention to the next step you’d like for them to take. Here’s an example from Peg Fitzpatrick:

Get Started on Twitter

If You’re Just Getting Started:
Twitter is known as the water cooler of social media. It’s intended for short communication, hence the 140-character limitation. But the value of Twitter is that you can get a lot of exposure by following the right people and producing share-worthy content. Let’s break that down:

Follow the right people. On Twitter, it’s a good idea to follow a lot of people. You should follow influencers in your industry along with customers or fans. Also, you should follow friends of your business, people who may or may not be your competitors, but are people whom you admire and to whom you’re willing to refer business to.

Produce share-worthy content. Everyone wants to produce viral content that gets shared all over the web. While no one knows the full recipe to going viral, one of the ingredients is definitely creating valuable content. This content must be one of the following:

Entertaining – A slice of delight in an otherwise dreary day, such as a funny meme

Educational – A post that promises knowledge that will benefit the reader, such as a how-to guide

Empowering – An inspirational moment that motivates the reader, such as a stirring quote or video

Aim for one or two #hashtags. One hashtag should always reflect something your audience is actually searching for

Include images in your tweets

Reach out to influencers with @mentions

Participate in Twitter Chats, which are opportunities to network and build brand recognition

If You’re Making Improvements:Look for opportunities to expand your network. Twitter is an open and fast-moving conversation. On Twitter, you can’t wait for an introduction. You’ll need to introduce yourself. Use Twitter’s Advanced Search to find people who are talking about the topics related to your brand. This is the easiest way to find network opportunities.

Use Twitter Analytics. Take a moment to look at Twitter Analytics to assess the health of your Twitter account. Along with the number of followers you’ve gained over a specific time period, your analytics page will give you a monthly overview of your top mentions and top tweets. This gives you a better understanding of what’s resonating with your audience.

Don’t Self-Promote All the Time

This is where a lot of brands get it wrong. You’re not on social media to talk just about yourself. You’re there to be social and interact with your valued customers and your colleagues and bring awareness of your brand to those who don’t know about you yet. But that doesn’t mean pushing the hard sell.

In social media, it’s more important to build a relationship with your audience by defining yourself as a trusted and authoritative resource on your subject matter. You want your audience to think of you as the definitive resource on whatever topic.

You’ll do that by loading them down with tons of valuable content. In your social streams, 80% of the time,, you’ll link to resources, how-to guides, interesting articles, podcasts that your audience will love and your own commentary on hot topics. The remaining 20% of the time, you can spend promoting your own stuff, making the case for your product or service.

Be Social

On social media, you shouldn’t hog the conversation, or else it’s not really a conversation, is it? You should also spend quite a bit of time doing the following:

Responding to any questions and comments – Be quick to reply back. You can curate a positive reputation as a brand that always answers back.

Ask compelling questions of your audience – Don’t just ask, also reply to the responses.

Follow back – You don’t have to just follow other businesses or industry influencers. You can also follow your fans, too.

Look at the Right Metrics

Likes and followers don’t mean much. Sure, it can be an ego boost to see that you have a lot of new followers, but that doesn’t directly correlate with the health of your business. Liking your page is free and takes less than a split second, but engaging in an actual business-consumer relationship requires much more effort and time.

A “like” can be the first step toward becoming a loyal customer of your brand, or it could be a random, one time interaction from a prospective customer who failed to convert.

That’s why, instead of measuring so called “Vanity Metrics,” such as likes, fans and followers, consider measuring click through rates.

You’ll need to be mindful of your sales funnel and how your social media marketing strategy fits in that funnel. Not only do you need to think of how you’re getting people from social media to your product or service, you also need to have a plan in place for getting people from social media to your product or service.

Keep a watchful eye on your referral traffic from social media. (You’ll do this with the help of Google Analytics.)

Consider Paid Ads

We can’t talk about social media marketing without devoting at least part of the conversation to paid advertisement.

Paid ads on social media are an effective way of getting in front of the right audience. The level of precision marketing can be scary, to be honest.

Let’s take Facebook for an example. Most of the free content that you produce on Facebook isn’t viewed by the bulk of your followers. Statistically speaking, around 10% or less of your followers will see your Facebook posts or updates.

However, Facebook has a very complicated algorithm that decides what content will be shown to your audience via the newsfeed.

Facebook definitely skews towards advertising. That’s the bad news.

But, the good news is that advertising on Facebook is amazing. You can target people based on basic demographics, such as age, location and interests. You can target those who’ve visited your site in the last 45 days, or those Facebook users who are also on your mailing list. You can even target people who “look like” the people on your mailing list.

That’s the reason why paid ads are a crucial element to social media marketing.

Have Patience

As with all forms of marketing, social media marketing takes time and patience before you see the results of your hard work. Research shows that familiarity with your brand caused by repeated exposure can build trust.